Brian Taylor

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When I left you two weeks ago, I joked that this column was turning into a series of book reports. This week is a little different, and I hope you'll indulge me this think-piece that contains no references to documents, no research.

I went to the funeral of my childhood best friend's father this week, and so I've been thinking a lot about death. 

Just so we don't get too heavy, let's take for granted that death on a page, on a screen, is different from actual death. If it is a particularly convincing portrayal, or a documentation of reality, or you are particularly invested in the characters involved, it may cause you to think about an actual death. This isn't about that kind of death -- this is death in fiction, death as a tool of the story.

When it's used in a book or a film or elsewhere, the protagonist's death serves a purpose. Maybe it's the glory (or pointlessness) of war; an end or a beginning. It's often a big deal -- a single death can be the focus of a work. But even incidental death can make a point about its (or life's) pointlessness or its randomness or its ubiquity.

In games, though, there is death without gravitas. It's the same iconography but a completely different meaning. During gameplay, it's a mark of failure. You didn't do what you were supposed to do. During cutscenes it takes on an air of the inevitable by virtue of its contrast with playable sections.

If the promise of the video game is that effects always follow causes, that there is a completely contained system in which outcomes can be predicted, a scripted and inevitable cutscene death can feel like a betrayal.

The early insistence that Aeris could return after being killed in a cutscene in Final Fantasy 7; the later belief that she was supposed to, but the feature was eventually cut. These are responses to that promise; an interpretation where a character's "life" is a feature to be cut, rather than her "death" being a tragic or necessary event. The hero does not die without the input of the player.

Submitted: narrative games are built around the ebb and flow of interactivity. Or not interactivity, but reactivity; of the game responding to the player's actions. That this is the essential feature of game narrative -- not agency, not choice, not options. Player presses buttons and the game provides feedback (a gun shoots, an avatar leaps); player chooses to perform actions at certain times and the game provides feedback; player reaches a certain point, cutscene plays.

"Playable" sections are reactive; "cutscenes" are not. The latter play out indifferent to your actions preceding them (or in response to one or two clearly demarcated "choices") -- same goes for Valve-style locked room conversations in which you retain full control over your character but things go on around you as if you didn't. Quick-time events make cutscenes reactive by requiring button presses at certain times.

Brian Taylor

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The shift between reactive and nonreactive and what it means for the permanence of actions is something you learn from playing video games. An avatar that takes hundreds of bullets during a reactive section can be put down by one during a nonreactive section. Characters that have been resurrected multiple times during a reactive section cannot recover from a stabbing in a nonreactive section. The rules are different depending on whether the game is reacting to you or not.

Mass Effect 2 leverages the tension the ebb and flow of reactivity creates in a seasoned gamer: during the endgame, you are never as tense about the survival of your controlled party as you are about that of therest of the party who is following your orders. The cutscenes during this sequence are intense because you know people may die; and unlike Aeris or Eli Vance, this isn't guaranteed as part of the plot. It's a reaction to your choices as a commander, to your relationship to the characters from earlier in the game.

It's the tension of knowing the events unfolding blend the permanence of the nonreactive with the player implication of the reactive. What happens to these characters will be permanent and it will be your fault.

At least, it will appear to be. It could be random. But would that randomness be breaking a promise to the player, a promise to allow them mastery over everything in the game world and not just their own actions toward it? A promise made by the feedback that is so necessary to the game narrative? A promise that handicaps games, prevents them from telling stories about how skill and perseverance don't always win in the end, from creating worlds where things are random and messy and unpredictable and unfair and life-like?

Brian Taylor doesn't tweet about death. Much. He also hasn't taken a walk through a cemetery in a long time.